Last
week, a press release was released announcing YourBofA.com, a new website
(apparently) from Bank of America. It was followed by another, seemingly
hastily-written press release imploring readers to ignore the “malicious
website (YourBofA.com) that is fraudulently representing itself as a Bank of
America re-branding effort.” The second release insisted, “Bank of America is
not making plans to enter into federal receivership.”

The
website (and both press releases)
were creations of the activist pranksters The Yes Men, who have pretended to speak for the World Trade Organization, Chevron, the World Economic Forum, and many others,
all in good, subversive fun. To learn how laughter can be the greatest weapon
of all, I sat down with Andy Bichlbaum, one of the founders of The Yes Men,
last month at Scratcher Bar in the East Village. In addition to The Yes Men,
The Yes Lab, and teaching at New York University, he has recently been involved
in developing the Plus Brigades, a project of Occupy Wall Street meant to
infuse the movement with renewed creativity in the streets.

Andy Bichlbaum: I
thought it would be good to get people thinking about what happens when you
bail out a bank. I’m presuming that when you bail out a bank, there’s probably
a lot of different ways to do it. One way would be just to give it a lot of
money. But another way would be to give it that money and say, “Okay, now we
own you.” In general, when you pay for things you own them. But, surprisingly,
in 2008 we gave them money but gained no control. And they just kept doing the
same old shit.

Gottesdiener: What was your favorite part of the action?

Bichlbaum: Bank
of America complained, so Google put a big phishing warning on the site. But
then we emailed all our friends and told them to complain to Google, so the
search engine took off the phishing warning. That was a pretty good example of
people power.

Gottesdiener: Let’s get to the basics: Why do more than march or
hold a rally? What’s the point of these fun, creative actions?

Bichlbaum: You
want a reason to have fun? That’s pretty easy: Because it’s fun. It galvanizes
people. There’s that famous
video of that guy dancing at [the music festival] Sasquatch and he’s
dancing alone on a hill and beckoning people to join him. At first two or three
people join him, and then after a while thousands of people have joined.

Gottesdiener: What makes people join in, besides the fact that
dancing is fun?

Bichlbaum: I
think it starts with having rules that are simple to follow. The other day, a
Plus Brigades clowning action at a Chase bank was really well-directed. These
kids happened to be passing by on the sidewalk, and one of them asked, “So, we
just fall down? Is that the rule?” They totally wanted to play along. I think
that’s when it’s infectious: When everyone is doing something purposefully that
has some rules to it.

Gottesdiener: But isn’t fun something spontaneous and
uncontrollable?

Bichlbaum: There
are always rules and structure. Even within an anarchist society there would be
lots of rules and structure, but hopefully a lot more fun.

Gottesdiener: It seems like now we have a lot of rules, but very
little fun. What’s up with that?

Bichlbaum: I
can’t think of a time in history when fun has been normal. There probably have
been times—I imagine the anarchists in Spain having fun all the time. But not
in our society. It’s a pretty radical vision: a world in which fun is normal.

Since
it’s not, fun is really useful politically—first, for the prefigurative reason,
because it shows people that life can be fun. Second, you can communicate a
simple message pretty powerfully using fun, so it’s good for getting messages
into the media.

Gottesdiener: How do you work with the media?

Bichlbaum: I
think of journalists as collaborators. There are a lot of really bad
journalistic organizations—there’s nothing good about CNN or MSNBC—but there
are a lot of individual journalists, including at CNN and MSNBC, that are
really friendly and love Occupy. When you do creative actions, it’s like you’re
giving journalists an extra token that allows them to say something important.

Gottesdiener: Does using fun also change the way the message is
communicated?

Bichlbaum: Definitely.
If you’re angry about something, you rant. But pushing facts down people’s
throats doesn’t work. Humor can really sideswipe this problem. It’s like
there’s a wall between you and a person, and if you make a joke, it’s a crack
in the wall.

Gottesdiener: But aren’t we a society that prides itself on being
rational, logical? Why don’t facts work?

Bichlbaum: Facts
don’t have any emotional weight. I believe there is an objective reality, but
we don’t live through facts. It’s like we’re dancing with objective reality.
And some people are closer to it than others. We build these structures
inside us that are much more powerful than facts because they are ours, and
they are deep and emotional. Imagine it’s this big eight-legged metal
thing that you’re living in that’s walking over reality—humor can knock off one
of the legs so that the creature falls over, and you’re suddenly looking at the
sky.

Gottesdiener: OK… I think I’m just going to draw that monster
instead of transcribe this interview.

Bichlbaum: Ha!
No that probably wouldn’t work.

Gottesdiener: Okay, so then tell me more.

Why do oppressed people have such great jokes? The pat explanation is that they
need solace, they need to laugh because they are suffering. But it also might
be that they constantly need to be inventive, to reinvent their relationship to
reality because it’s so inimical to them.

Bichlbaum: Well,
why do oppressed people have such great jokes? The pat explanation is that they
need solace, they need to laugh because they are suffering. But it also might
be that they constantly need to be inventive, to reinvent their relationship to
reality because it’s so inimical to them.

Making
jokes pierces through the stupid logic that supports a system, and we laugh
because we know that it makes no sense. It’s laughing at yourself for being so
stupid as to believe in this system.

You
know when you laugh so hard your sides are splitting? It’s because everything
you thought was true is not true anymore. And then you’re left with nothing,
which is hilarious in just the sheer hopelessness of it. When we create jokes
about society and the way reality is and how it can be, it’s a way of getting
past this reality and recreating the world.

Gottesdiener: Do you think power structures are derived from people
believing in that power?

Bichlbaum: Of
course. No one can govern without the consent of the governed. So making fun of
power enables people to see in themselves how they are the power, and how they are propping it up—how we
are all propping it up. And the more you can laugh at that, the more you stop
doing it.

Gottesdiener: So, if you recognize the power and how you reinforce
it, and if the power wouldn’t exist unless you reinforce it, then…

Bichlbaum: Then
you just go, Shit! You collapse
on the ground laughing because you are the one making these crazy decisions.

Gottesdiener: You are the thing that’s oppressing yourself.

Bichlbaum: Yeah!
Why do we do that?

Gottesdiener: Is that the reason that your work often centers on
Wall Street or the government or the NYPD? Is that your political slant coming
through, or is the 1 percent just the funniest group to make jokes about?

Bichlbaum: They
are the only people to make fun of. Why would you make fun of anyone that
doesn’t have a ton of power? That’s not funny. It’s not funny to make fun of
the weak.

Gottesdiener: You send out a lot of fake press releases, but you
also do on-the-ground actions. Why bother with the real world if we all sit in
front of our computers for the majority of our lives anyway?

Bichlbaum: Because
the real world is real, and the virtual world doesn’t really exist. Computers
are only good for communicating simple information from one point to another,
and yes they’re an improvement over the telephone, or town criers, or smoke
signals, but they’re not categorically different.

And
the smoke signal, or the computer, has to reference something visceral. In
Egypt, Facebook was supposedly so important, but it was really useful only to
tell everyone to go to Tahrir Square, and that only worked because everyone
knew there was a reason to. Facebook didn’t give the reason; everyone knew why
because of life.

Interested?

Great moments in “laughtivism” from Yes Men Andy Bichlbaum and Mike
Bonanno, the guys who duped the BBC, embarrassed Dow Chemical, and
mocked Halliburton.

To show how ludicrous an idea is, sometimes you have to take it seriously.

How Occupiers, pranksters, and artists speak louder than money.

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Laura Gottesdiener is an activist with Occupy Wall Street, a
freelance journalist, and a contributor to Waging Nonviolence, where this interview first appeared.